New York Film Festival Slate Includes ‘Ballad of Buster Scruggs,’ ‘If Beale Street Could Talk’

Published: Aug 8, 2018

The New York Film Festival will screen new offerings from Oscar winners such as Joel & Ethan Coen, Barry Jenkins, and Paweł Pawlikowski.

According to Variety, on Tuesday, the fall gathering unveiled the 30 films that will screen as part of its main slate. They include “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” a western anthology from the Coen brothers; “If Beale Street Could Talk,” Jenkins’ adaptation of James Baldwin’s novel of the same name; and “Cold War,” a Soviet-era love story that earned rave reviews for Pawlikowski when it debuted at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Like “Cold War,” many of the movies highlighted at the New York Film Festival have previously screened at other influential festivals, such as Venice or Toronto. The lack of world premieres is a sign of the competition that these taste-making events face in landing awards-season contenders. Instead, New York is contenting itself with a series of U.S. and North American premieres.

It’s still an impressive array of auteurs who will be hitting the Big Apple in the hopes of bolstering their Oscar chances. Other films include Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Palme d’Or–winner “Shoplifters”; Jean-Luc Godard’s meditation on art and death “The Image Book”; Claire Denis’ science-fiction drama “High Life”; and Tamara Jenkins’ pregnancy comedy “Private Life.” The New York Film Festival is an increasingly global affair. Its main slate showcases films from 22 different countries, including China, Japan, Poland, South Korea, Argentina, and Qatar. Four of the 30 films are from female directors.

The festival has already announced that the festival will kick off with Yorgos Lanthimos’ “The Favourite,” a historical drama with Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz set during the reign of Queen Anne. “Roma,” a family drama from Alfonso Cuaron, will be the Centerpiece selection. The closing night film is “At Eternity’s Gate,” Julian Schnabel’s look at Vincent van Gogh’s final years.

“Francis Ford Coppola said that the cinema would become a real art form only when the tools of moviemaking became as inexpensive as paints, brushes, and canvases,” NYFF director and selection committee chair Kent Jones said in a statement. “That has come to pass, but at the same time, it’s become increasingly tough to do serious work that is beholden to nothing but the filmmaker’s need to express these emotions in this form in moving images and sound. So if I were pressed to choose one word to describe the films in this year’s main slate, it would be bravery.”

The New York Film Festival is presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and will run from Sept. 28 to Oct. 14.